Thursday, September 06, 2012

Not sure the good folks at the Baltimore Office Sign Company want to see this Szymborski deal ever happen.

I want to see the O’s have another waive of ‘brain power’ added to the organization this Winter.

The Astros have hired Kevin Goldstein from Baseball Prospectus as their Pro Scouting Coordinator. This is a perfectly logical move to me, but extremely progressive for a MLB team.

I’d like to see the Orioles consider hiring Dan Szymborski (founder of ZiPS, EIC of Baseball Think Factory, contributor to ESPN) to their Baseball Analytics department. Boston has utilized Bill James for years. ‘Tom Tango’ (alias) is employed by an undisclosed MLB team. Szymborski would be a comparable hire. The fact that he is a Baltimore native does not hurt either.

Baltimore employs Anderson, and Thomas as Special Assistants to the EVP (Duquette), but do not employ a traditional ‘Assistant General Manager.’

...Adding Szymborski’s Sabermetric background, and Coppolella’s Scouting background would be two very large improvements to the organization as a whole.

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Strangely though, now that I'm giving it some thought I've never given before, I work in high end restaurants in Bmore. Like the best ones in town. The Ravens are in all the time, not just the team but the FO.
They have a pretty active presence in the city. The FO does big dinners, lots of meetings, some real expensive conferences.They are always out and about, from ownership to GM to team execs
But in all these years, I don't think I've ever seen the Orioles brass out once.
No parties. No wining/dining free agents. No corporate meetings. Nada.
And I've never heard of it from fellow restaurant folk (And Bmores a pretty small town, stories go through this place quick.)

Doesn't every team use data and have access to information about prospects and trade bait? Are there some mysterious bits of significant data that only the big name saber guys know? And yet millions have been spent for players like Carl Crawford, Carlos Lee, Cliff Lee, Barry Zito, Prince Fielder, Mark T. and Albert P. Teams with money continue to spend lots of it on long term contracts to big name athletes who have had a big year or two.

I don't really think that the players the Astros obtained during the house cleaning this season are the best young players in baseball and doubt that most will be in the majors in 3 years. Not anyone's fault but the players who were given up were flawed, had contract issues or were soon to be free agents while the players obtained were marginal types that the other teams were willing to unload.While a savvy stats guy can certainly identify quality talent, can he somehow get this type of player to play for the Astros? How do you do that and how do you get several of these guys in competition with 29 other smart front offices?

I think there's probably a lot of work to be done integrating raw stats with things like pitchFX or swing trajectory and bat speeds that top stats guys can do. Projections (public ones at least) are still very heavily based on trends and averages and there is a lot of room to individualize them more.

For minor leaguers, guys like Dan Straily still slip through the prospect lists despite all of the data and reports that are out there. There has to be room there for improvement.

Doesn't every team use data and have access to information about prospects and trade bait? Are there some mysterious bits of significant data that only the big name saber guys know? And yet millions have been spent for players like Carl Crawford, Carlos Lee, Cliff Lee, Barry Zito, Prince Fielder, Mark T. and Albert P. Teams with money continue to spend lots of it on long term contracts to big name athletes who have had a big year or two.

It's not so much there are a whole bunch of secret stats out there, but hiring someone that has extensive experience thinking creatively and organizing information about baseball. You're not *really* hiring Kevin Goldstein because he's x% better at scouting players, but because he has extensive experience considering conflicting, irregularly collected, information about baseball players and critically evaluating that information. That's a very useful skillset and with a writer, you essentially get to evaluate them before paying them a red cent.